A Rarely Seen Side of a Rauschenberg Shift

The transfer drawings that Robert Rauschenberg made in the 1960s are less like works of art than a series of refined filtering systems. Caught in their nets is a mixture of seemingly random images and words: the headlines and newsmakers of the day, all manner of advertisements, athletes and historical figures, personal asides and not a little editorializing. Part core sample of an era and part personal diary, the drawings are seldom seen, especially in large numbers, which makes the exhibition of 44 of them at the Jonathan O’Hara Gallery an event of great interest.

The transfer drawings, a mix of handmade mechanical intervention and a little collage, were forerunners of art’s preoccupation with appropriation. But the ones from the ’60s have been overshadowed by Mr. Rauschenberg’s better-known illustrations for Dante’s “Inferno,” a suite of 34 transfer drawings from 1959-60 that are now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. The most coherently narrative works of his career, the Dante drawings represent a crucial turning point: they translate from three to two dimensions the fusion of ready-made and manipulated material that so energized Mr. Rauschenberg’s famous combines.

The transfer technique, which he took up in 1958, had remarkably few moving parts. It involved soaking newspaper or magazine clippings in solvent, laying them face down on drawing paper and then hatching back and forth across them with a dry pen nib. The results dazzle; in a flickering, almost strobelike effect, images seem to rise to the surface like memories through a scrim — or through the static of a television set. The critic Lawrence Alloway likened the fluctuating motifs to “a postcard stand in a windstorm.”

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"Robert Rauschenberg: Transfer Drawings From the 1960s," at the Jonathan O'Hara Gallery, includes this untitled 1968 work using watercolor and pencil.Credit
Jonathan O’Hara Gallery

Crossing cameraless photomontage with paperless collage in a manner both improvisatory and mechanical, the transfer technique perfectly suits the time-capsule character of these works. Process and subject become one. Each fragment acquires the sheen of age without sentimentality, the veneer of touch without traditional rendering.

The less-studied ’60s transfer drawings are larger, freer in gesture and clearer than the Dante series. Images of Hubert H. Humphrey, Barry Goldwater, Malcolm X, the Apollo 7 astronauts, Army helicopters and civil rights protesters establish Mr. Rauschenberg’s interests: politics, the space race, the war in Vietnam, the plight of black Americans. Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, appears several times. Men in suits bespeak entrenched authority. President Richard M. Nixon lines up with the members of his cabinet; their wives cluster around his. Sprinkled at the margins of the group portraits are the faces of black and white football players (including O. J. Simpson) and the regimented rows of a high school yearbook.

It would be a mistake to label the accumulations random. Meanings are multiple, as the art historian Lewis Kachur points out in his thoughtful essay for the exhibition’s catalog; they form a free-ranging, nonlinear rebus. In one work the smiling faces of astronauts who went to the Moon fall between an image of a grinning chimpanzee and a small picture of the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun; all are balanced by an outline of the artist’s left foot — a small step for man. And nestled in the lower right corner, a minuscule map of the world showing the astronauts’ orbit sits next to a hot-air balloon.

Sometimes forms are altered in ways that thwart easy recognition. In the drawing “Trapped,” what appears to be a schematic ring of fire is simply a partial transfer of the rim of a glass of orange juice. While images of athletes shown tackling, pitching or batting capture America’s obsession with sports, snippets from ads — for household appliances, cars, watches and girdles — convey its materialism. Yet the purchasable is personal; the recurring spark plugs could be stand-ins for the artist, who gets all this going.

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A 1969 Rauschenberg, with references to the space program.Credit
Jonathan O’Hara Gallery

Similarly personal are the occasional bottles of Jack Daniel’s and J & B Scotch, brands Mr. Rauschenberg favored; an image of the choreographer Merce Cunningham, his close friend; and sly evocations of fellow artists like Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol. Such offhand conjurings — a Johns-like target in the drawing devoted to the astronauts for example — seem to say that anything you can do, I can do easier.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s transfer drawings of the ’60s — especially the late ’60s — depart most emphatically from his Dante drawings in their frequent use of language, lifted from newspaper headlines or ads. This expands the spare use of such everyday signs in Cubist collage to a position of dominance, giving meaning a new equality with form.

The blunt language of newspapers contrasts with the delicacy of the drawings’ wavering surfaces, which are often enhanced by white gouache, ink washes or watercolor. “Five Red Nations Invade Czechs,” announces one headline. “Grenades, Mortars Take Grim Toll in Saigon,” says another. But elsewhere a small sign says, “Poems Wanted.” The conflation of reading and looking — so important to art since 1970 — is born.

The back-and-forth windshield-wiper action in Mr. Rauschenberg’s drawing strokes suggests interesting analogies. It repeats but reverses his famous erasure of part of a de Kooning drawing: here the strokes reveal rather than eradicate. But the most intriguing connection may be to Pollock; the highly structured automatism of the transfer hatching could be the cousin, once removed, of Pollock’s drips. There is a similar sense of the physical rhythm, of the artist’s hand and body in action yet not in traditional contact with the surface of the work.

The immediacy is thrilling; these works seem to come into being before our eyes as we trace and retrace their formation, their instantaneousness. They happen in a flash and never stop happening. It is an aspect of Mr. Rauschenberg’s genius that he folded history itself into the mix, making it part of a tumult that, for better and for worse, we can trace to the present.

“Robert Rauschenberg: Transfer Drawings From the 1960s” is on view through March 17 at the Jonathan O’Hara Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, Manhattan; (212) 644-3533.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Rarely Seen Side of a Rauschenberg Shift. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe